ME:A Basic Gear Modding
Welcome to the Basic Gear modding tutorial where you will learn the basics of editing the available weapons and armour inside the game. The most you will be doing in this tutorial is changing numbers in the gear variables so don't worry about it being too complex. Important Note: Changes to weapons and armour will be applied in multiplayer as well so please DISABLE the mod before joining multiplayer. You have been warned. Details will be explained during the tutorial. Guns In the Data Explorer to the left of your editor, go to the game/exceldataimports folder. Upon selecting the folder, you will see the object browser below populate with objects relating to game stats. From their names, you should begin to recognise which each one affects however for this tutorial we will only be looking at two of those; "armorstats" and "gunstats". We shall start with editing guns first however it is important to note that editing armour stats is very similar to editing gun stats, as you will soon see. Double click gunstats on the object browser and its properties should appear on the right hand side of the editor. There you should see two properties, "Name" and "WeaponTable". Click on the WeaponTable property to open up the list of weapon tables. It should take a sec or two to load the list due to the number of weapon tables present. Each level of gun has its own weapon table so just imagine every gun in the game and times it by ten. In the list you should see a whole lot of weapon table entries. Open the first one and open up its values property. A number of weapon attribute values should appear underneath. If you open each of those fields, you will see a number. These are the values that affect various aspects of the gun such as damage, rate of fire, damage force and so on. At this point you will realise that changing values will be meaningless if you don't know what you are changing. However, there is a way to find out and for that, we head back to the data explorer and go to the game/weapons folder. Under the folder you will see sub-folders for weapon class. You can pick any gun type you like but I will be editing the avenger 1 weapon so for that, go to assaultrifles/_launch/avenger. In the object browser for the avenger folder, locate the "gun_assaultrifle_mws_avenger_01" object. You should remember the format "gun_guntype_mws_gunbrand_gunlevel" since these are the weapon data objects which hold the various properties for a gun and will help you figure out where the gun is in the gunstats weapon tables list and where its properties are. Open the "gun_assaultrifle_mws_avenger_01" object and in the properties window you should see all the properties regarding the gun such as its appearance, texture, rarity and combat stats. To find the damage property, we will need to go to the 'HeldBaseStats' property and in the first BWStatElement underneath it, you will find the damage stat. In the Value->BaseValue sub property you will find "IfTrue", "IfFalse" and "Condition". (Normally under BaseValue you will find the fields that will tell you what the weapon index and field index for the weapon stat is but for the stats under HeldBaseStats it is a little bit different. When you are in single player or MP non host, gun statistic values will be taken from exceldataimport/gunstats however if you are in multiplayer and you are the host, it will be taken from exceldataimport/gunstatsmp and will be applied for every player in your MP game. Hence the "Condition" for BaseValue is whether or not you are in multiplayer.) Under IfFalse, you will find the WeaponIndex and FieldIndex values. So here we learn that the WeaponIndex is 0 and the FieldIndex is 0 so all you have to do now is go back to gunstats properties and go to the WeaponTable at index 0 (the first Weapon Table) and edit the Weapon Attribute Value at index 0. Now all you have to do is save your project and click the Launch button to test your mod. The Frosty Editor launch button only applies your mod to the game for one session so as soon as you are done testing the mod in game, just close the game and the mod will no longer be present in future play if you launch the game through origin. If you want to permanently install your mod, goto File -> Export as Mod and fill in the relevant details. Then it will give you a file which you can install through Frosty's Mod Manager. Note from Author: Will finish this tutorial another time but the basic method for changing combat stats is covered and can be applied to the rest such as powers, players etc. Category:Basic Tutorials Category:Frosty Tool Suite